Michele Back Email & Phone Number

Dr. Michele Back is Associate Professor of World Languages Education at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education, where she works with Spanish, French, Chinese, and ASL language teacher candidates. Dr. Back’s research interests include teacher development and professionalization; cultivating global citizenship; the ethical and equitable use of language learning technology, intersections of race and discourse; the role of discourse in constructing identities; developing a pedagogy of symbolic competence; and the role of translanguaging and multilingual ecology in transforming schools and other communities of practice. She has published articles in the Modern Language Journal, Foreign Language Annals, TESOL Quarterly, and CALICO, as well as the monograph Transcultural Performance: Negotiating Globalized Indigenous Identities (Palgrave, 2015). She also co-edited with Dr. Virginia Zavala the multi-authored work Racialization and Language: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Peru (Routledge, 2019). She currently serves on the ACTFL Board as an at-large higher education representative.

Listed skills include Discourse Analysis, Spanish, Portuguese, Ethnography, and 24 others.